Move /home to Windows Partition

Campy19 · 11-22-2003, 10:26 PM

I have Mandrake 9.2 installed and running on my slave drive. Unfortunately, when I did the install I just went with the install programs suggestions. What I have currently is root, swap, and home on the slave drive and a lot of free space on my Windows partition. How can I move my /home directory to the Windows ME partition without destroying data AND screwing up linux?? I also want to make the root directory larger than it is on the slave drive. I believe that I should defrag the windows partition and turn off VM, and then use diskdrake on the Windows ME partition. Thanks.

xode · 11-22-2003, 10:35 PM

Quote:

I believe that I should defrag the windows partition and turn off VM, and then use diskdrake on the Windows ME partition. Thanks.

This has the best chance of suceeding. However, the old precaution of make a complete backup of all Windows ME data first still applies, just in case you have to reinstall Windows ME.

/bin/bash · 11-23-2003, 12:24 AM

This is an FYI post.

You should be able to resize the partition without a problem. But if you just couldn't risk trashing the partition you could actually make a linux filesystem on that windows partition.

If your windows partition was mounted at /win/c.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/win/c/home bs=1024 count=1000000 #This makes a 1G file.
mke2fs /win/c/home
mke2fs 1.34 (25-Jul-2003)
/win/c/home is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
125184 inodes, 250000 blocks
12500 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
8 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
15648 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376

Writing inode tables: done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 30 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

Now /win/c/home is a Linux ext2 filesystem we can mount just like a partition using the -o loop option:

# mount /win/c/home /home -o loop
# ls /home
lost+found/

# df /home
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/win/c/home 962M 20K 913M 1% /home

# mount
/win/c/home on /home type ext2 (rw,loop=/dev/loop0)

You can even put an entry in /etc/fstab. So anytime you are getting low on Linux file space you don't necessarily have to make a new partition.

CAUTION: The dd command will write a single continuous block. So you should defrag the vfat partition before using this, or you could lose data.